As the lore of Detroit hip-hop’s yesteryear continues to grow, so has the desire to see all the legendary locations associated with it. The movie 8 Mile boosted the notoriety of the Shelter (within Saint Andrew’s Hall), while The Hip Hop Shop was more recently featured on Netflix’s The Evolution of Hip-Hop. Enter Kris Hoff, a 26-year veteran of the touring industry who owns Distinctly Detroit Tours, a company that will be hosting an upcoming “Hip-Hop History Tour.”
“I was looking for something fresh and innovative for a Detroit tour because I was tired of doing the same thing for 26 years,” Hoff told WJR 760 am in an interview that aired July 18. “I don’t feel that there’s enough people that know how great Detroit is and there is so many things here that is undiscovered by people.”
To assist with the curation Hoff reached out to veteran emcees Ron “Phat Kat” Watts, who had actually conducting Detroit hip-hop tours for the last five years. She also enlisted the help of emcee Ronnnie “Killa Ghanz” Kelly and Jerry Flynn Dale, whose Def Sound studio became Michigan’s first hip-hop landmark in May of this year.
“[Hoff] came here because she thought Detroit was a great hip-hop city and she noticed there was not a hip-hop tour in Detroit,” Dale says.
Dr. Khalid el-Hakim is the founder of the Black History 101 Museum. He was previously the vice president of Proof’s Iron Fist records and has been an avid hip-hop memorabilia collector since the early 1980s.
“It’s not surprising, we have a long history of hip-hop in Detroit,” he says. “Some of the first Fresh Fest concerts happened in Detroit. Hump the Grinder was one of the first backers… It’s all history and it’s all important. It’s also important who tells the story.”
Participants of the tour will make stops by The Hip Hop Shop, Def Sound Studio, J Dilla’s childhood home, the Rhythm Kitchen, Future Funk Records, and more.
For Dale, Future Funk Records was one of his starting spots. Standing as a small store front, its owner would put out a makeshift stage in front where aspiring emcees like him and Kalimah “Nikki D” Johnson would rap and encourage each other. Along with The Hip Hop Shop, the Rhythm Kitchen held hip-hop-themed events sponsored by clothing designer Maurice Malone.
“They were instrumental places to Detroit hip-hop,” he says. “They were incubators, I can’t imagine hip-hop in Detroit with them.”
Detroit is not the first city to offer tours exploring its contributions through hip-hop. Tours in Atlanta will take you to the Trap Music Museum, while tours in Los Angeles offer narrated trips to the homes where movies like Friday and Boyz n the Hood were filmed. For Detroit, one of the biggest highlights for participants will be taking a drive by the previous home of J Dilla within Detroit’s historic Conant Gardens neighborhood. Artists such as Common, Erykah Badu, and Q-Tip are a few of the heavyweights that spent time in Dilla’s basement studio inside the home.
“People loved J Dilla worldwide,” adds el-Hakim. “It’s something about him and his legacy that’s mythical. It’s a mythicism behind him that people are into.”
He also believes there is even more history to unearth, but Detroit needs more artists to write down their history. “It’s so many artists in Detroit that have made amazing contributions but are overlooked because it’s not documented anywhere,” says el-Hakim. “If we don’t write our stories and share them with the world, they get lost in history.”
Dale says the tour has received support from the Mayor’s office and the Detroit Historical Advisory Board. Dale, Watts, and Kelly will share the responsibility of narrating the tour. In the future they plan on expanding the tour with stops at venues like Harpos, the C-Note Lounge, and the Ebony Showcase Lounge.
“I want them to experience Detroit hip-hop in its stages,” he says. “We have big rappers here. We have Big Sean, we have Em, ICP, we have all the younger rappers that’s here like Tee Grizzley. I want them to understand that hip-hop is not just some thuggery stuff that we’re doing. We’ve put a lot of work into this. We used Motown as the blueprint to expand this to a national stage.”
The Hip-Hop History Tour of Detroit starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 11 at the Fisher Building. More information is available at distinctivelydetroit.com.
